Guild Wars 2

MrForz.1953:

Depends of the ‘get out of jail free button’.

I’ve been spending around 20min trying to instagib some sword / dagger Thief through hard CC spam and sheer Rifle + Static Discharge damage and the only thing I’ve found to succeed is to turn into a bait by reducing my health to 40% and going in hoping for the Thief to be overconfident.

Luckily most thieves really are bad. How many thieves have you seen use sword #2 on another target like a bunny, THEN steal to get a full 1,200 return when they use it? Very few if any, but it’s an easy way to get a full 1,200 range initiation from the normally 600 range move. Throws people off too.

wish.1027:

When Im playing my guardian and I meet similar engineers, I pop stability and smash their turrets and beat them to death while they do basically no damage to me. Would you prefer that outcome? Or would you come to the forums and cry that stability and the mass condition removal guardians have is OP and ask for it to be nerfed also?

When I meet guardians like that as part of a group I plop flame turret and pulsing blind on them. As they flail ineffectively I place Rocket Turret and Rifle Turret in slightly different locations. The guardian, now covered in bleeds, poisoned by my pistols, burns, and blinded now tries to escape as the team eats him. Upon his stability fading my rocket turret knocks him down ensuring his death.

We can do that kind of thing all day long. But if you guardian was at 5% covered in conditions, immobilzed, and stunned you would have to be 1 of a select few builds to survive. IE you gave up the ability to do alot of others things to do that.

Azraeel.1238:

Ralathar.7236:

Azraeel.1238:

Ralathar.7236:

But even in this extreme situation with everything going my way including the thief being bad, he lives because he can stun break, teleport, condition remove, heal, stealth, and removes all damage conditions within 1 second without stat or trait investment and sacrificing only 1 utility slot.

Actually, to be able to remove the conditions the way you listed, he must trait it.

Hide in Shadows removes all damaging conditions, also the sword shadow return removes a single condition, the utility skill version removes three conditions. No traits needed for any of those.

Okay, one at a time:
1- Hide in Shadows removes burning, poison, and bleeding. Can’t cure confusions.
2- For the Shadowstep/Shadow Return Utility, he must have initiated it on attack to be able to use the shadow return, otherwise he will end up back next to you. Most thieves use steal as a starter, not waste a utility off the bat.
3- This leaves the shadow return from sword, curing one condition, which isn’t enough.

1. True enough, though honestly once you re stealth how much damage are you going to take from confusion?

2. That’s actually pretty untrue. It’s situational. there are alot of good thieves out there that use it as a safe initiation because you know by the time it fades how well the fight is going to go. D/D commonly uses it to initiate safely. S/D would have no real reason to use it to initiate because it has one built into sword That would matter in this case if not for the immediate stealthing afterwards. D/P laughs at all of the above.

3. See above for S/D. As far as the condition removal from S/D not being enough, why do you need more than HIS for escaping and living honestly? The conditional removal from either Shadow Return is just extra overkill conditional removal on top of the heal. The main thing here is that it ports you up to 1,200 range instantly.

randomfightfan.4091:

Ralathar.7236:

Azraeel.1238:

Ralathar.7236:

But even in this extreme situation with everything going my way including the thief being bad, he lives because he can stun break, teleport, condition remove, heal, stealth, and removes all damage conditions within 1 second without stat or trait investment and sacrificing only 1 utility slot.

Actually, to be able to remove the conditions the way you listed, he must trait it.

Hide in Shadows removes all damaging conditions, also the sword shadow return removes a single condition, the utility skill version removes three conditions. No traits needed for any of those.

Imagine if an ele used blink and the channeled heal. That’d be less skills used, more conditions cleared, and more healing. They could even use armor of earth to break the first stun and be immune to all the subsequent stuns and just wreck the turret engi’s life. Even a warrior could stability and immunity through most of that combo, easily destroy the turrets, and most likely destroy the engi. Mesmer could blink away and clear the conditions as well. They’d require a few more skills but it’s a mesmer… it could have killed the engi without ever walking into the turret field. Guardian could also have easily walked into the turret field, stability’d through everything, destroyed everything with gs or hammer, and most likely destroyed that engi (not saying you’re bad, just the build is easily counterable). Just imagine if a grenade engi saw that turret engi. What a field day he’d be having.

So now, why are you singling out thief? What he did wasn’t special. Any class could have done it. You are literly complaining that someone stun broke your stun and cleansed your conditions. That’s not thief specific.

1st off this isn’t “who would have beat my engineer with turrets”. He is not a kitten. He is a useful build that is middle of the line in effectiveness that can be good used well. Countless classes can counter my turrets, like a well necro, that’s why you don’t see people play turret build. This was an example of someone being able to escape a rediculously bad situation easily with no build investment and little utility skill investment. Lets go into this.

The ele example. They literally revolve their whole buld around what you said at that point. Because they are built bunker or at least hybrid and are sacrificing other extremely useful heals for a channeled heal that can be interrupted.

If they used armor of earth or lightning flash (not blink, that’s mesmer), then they would have to choose a tradeoff on both their heal and use 1 or even 2 utility skills dedicated to defense. The channeled heal itself is interrupt-able so without some sort of stability coverage the heal would have significant weaknesses. So not running armor of earth would leave their main heal extremely counter-able, not running lightning flash severely limits their escapability.. So the ele would almost assuredly be running both with that heal choice. Otherwise that is a terrible heal choice.

Also notice that lightning flash is 900 range, not 1,200 like shadow return and that ele has no stealth. Also, unlike the thief version the channel allows the ele to be continually taking damage as it slowly cures 1 condition per pulse, 1 condition every half second to be exact. So at this point that is blind, immobilize, poison, burning, and bleeding. During this time my turrets, being in range on an immobilized target, will still be stacking bleeding and burning and immobilize when I once more get into glue shot range. I really hope the channel doesn’t remove a condition that just got re-applied, the immobilize, or the blind first but instead hits the poison first to save the 33% reduced heal!!

My pistols have 900 range, chances are I could stay inside range to deal damage. My turrets however have 1,100 and 1,300 range. So the outcome of the fight is still rather dicey for an d/d ele once placed in that position. As well when we move out of the range of the turrets I’ll be detonating them and gaining the toolbelt skills that I will immediate use.

Others in that terrible 5% hp, conditioned, locked down situation.
Warrior: In a situation like that the warrior is dead, no question about it.
Guardian: The Guardian in that example is going to be dead without significant build investment.
Mesmer: Really dead lol. Self condition removal not a strong point of Mesmer.
Grenade Engie: All that would be left is a greasy spot.

Believe it or not I am pretty versed in most classes. However, ele is my main.

bhagwad.4281:

lLobo.7960:

Ralathar.7236:

Pop my turret abilities and he gets perma-blinded, has like 10 seconds of burning, has 6+ stacks of bleed, Rocket Turret lands the first knockdown, I time the supply crate for the second stun, rocket turret knocks down a third time. All knockdowns in a row without him being able to act after eating the first one.

At this point the thief still has all the burning, bleeding, and now poison on him, is at 5% hp, and is stunned on his back while immobilized. Shadow Return, Hide in Shadows, runs away at half health with no conditions on him already out of combat.

Am I the only one that thinks its crazy how can someone apply such an amount of CC and conditions to leave the opponent without being able to act and at the same time complain that others are OP?

Really? He had it all set up beforehand and used his elite to stun. It’s sheer arrogance to go in when you see your opponent preparing their turrets and staking out the area and then complain that they’re “OP” when they reap the benefits of their preparations.

To be fair I threw them on top of his head once he decided to engage. But also to be fair, at this point he should have immediately dis-engaged instead of attempting to fight me at my turrets.

Azraeel.1238:

Ralathar.7236:

But even in this extreme situation with everything going my way including the thief being bad, he lives because he can stun break, teleport, condition remove, heal, stealth, and removes all damage conditions within 1 second without stat or trait investment and sacrificing only 1 utility slot.

Actually, to be able to remove the conditions the way you listed, he must trait it.

Hide in Shadows removes all damaging conditions, also the sword shadow return removes a single condition, the utility skill version removes three conditions. No traits needed for any of those.

miriforst.1290:

Ralathar, yes it is highly annoying when after even the most failed attempt at bursting you down (like spamming HS in immobilize or backstabbing when we static shield) any thief with half his wit can reset the game to try again. But as many have probably said already, using a turret build (the most immobile build on the most immobile class) and not catching the most mobile class with a mechanic inclined for spamming the skill most necessary for the situation shouldn’t be surprising. This is actually one of the very few cases that i agree with the sentiment “if he runs you have won”, turrets have only one special niche, playing an offensive bunker vs solo players without pets, massive aoe, conditions or range (yes, ive killed and/or driven off bunker/hybrid eles just running straight onto my close by pouring down overcharges until his ears starts bleeding) by stunlocking them and filling them full with conditions.

Pretty poor bunker ele’s as bunker ele’s tend to have ace condition removal. They actually work pretty well as a thief deterrent (non sword, if they are sword GG) as they catch him as soon as he exit stealth (overcharging a net turret when he stealths for a backstabb means a stunned thief unable to follow up) and they are usually built glassy enough for the turrets to be a threat.

Of course no sane person would ever run turrets in spvp seriously (i do for trolling sometimes) as mesmers are essentially a hard counter for you, and they aren’t exactly rare.

Quite true.

And in the case of wvwvw none with any reason at all would use turrets other than for using their tool belt skills in a static discharge build. Meaning don’t place turrets in wvw, believe me you’l be sorry.

I wouldn’t say turret build is competitive with the best builds, but it’s viable and isn’t that bad. Turrets just need to be a little less frail and have a few things ironed out. The build is competitive when the turrets can be kept up for a reasonable time (other than long cooldowns)

lLobo.7960:

Am I the only one that thinks its crazy how can someone apply such an amount of CC and conditions to leave the opponent without being able to act and at the same time complain that others are OP?

I chain stunned a squishy with easily avoidable (aside from supply crate) moves and killed him. The knockdown rockets from the turrets take about the same amount of time no matter the distance and are the only rockets the turrent launches in a high arc 10 feet into the air. For refrence you can see this coming from about 3/4 second to a full second away. 2 of the 3 CC stuns were tied to turrets which are both immobile and can be countered. When killed the turret has a lengthy 50 second cooldown and it has less than 7,500 health and less than 1,300 armor.

If you think this amount of CC is bad you’ve never met a CC warrior. They have about triple what I just listed there and can easily keep one person without control of thei character for over 10 seconds without a stun break. The kicker is that at least 3 of these skills are AOE and 1 of them is a fear which you can use the knockdown time to position yourself into making them run into danger and away from safety.

Honestly complaining about the CC of Rocket Turret is like complaining about 100 Blades damage. Technically it’s very good but it’s so easily avoided it’s comical. Luckily many players are flat out bad.

randomfightfan.4091:

Prople like him will keep complaining until they get a nuke that is an un-dodge-able aoe with the tool-belt skill being a missile that instantly kills a target. That way it won’t matter that he can still perma lock down an area. He will be able to commit genocide instead.

What scratch that. He will then complain if he misses the nuke and the thief shadow steps away, leaving a charred pile of poop from fear. Thief will always be op to these people no matter what the situation.

Turrets need a buff, this is true. How many turret users do you see, well, anywhere? Now how many dual dagger thieves do you see? Now how many sword/pistol thieves do you see?

This scenario makes a perfect example because it is an extreme situation. One that only played out so well for me because the thief was bad. He could have easily dodged that 1st knockdown and could have broken stun during the 1st two knockdowns at any time. This isn’t a trick dodge like thieves telling people to listen for CnD to dodge it, this is a highly visible rocket with about a full second of air time.

But even in this extreme situation with everything going my way including the thief being bad, he lives because he can stun break, teleport, condition remove, heal, stealth, and removes all damage conditions within 1 second without stat or trait investment and sacrificing only 1 utility slot.

LameFox.6349:

lunyboy.8672:

LameFox.6349:

Yes, fire all of your CC in rapid succession, then be surprised when it gets cleared in the same manner. I mean that just doesn’t happen… all those stacked knockdowns (two, by the way, not three) and even stun/immobilise. What could possibly defeat such measures?!

Oh, right, loads of things.

Only someone who has never, ever successfully played an Engineer in any high-level content would post anything at all about rocket boots.

We are very limited on our skill bar as it is, since we generally have to use kits for damage/utility instead of having a weapons swap, and 99% of level 80 Engineers will never seriously slot this on their bar, but thanks for the laugh.

Engineer was my second 80 after warrior, has full exotics + asc amulet (call of the wild). I’ve used the class in dungeons, solo lvl 2 fractals because nobody is ever running them when I’m online as the whole server is asleep, WvW, and of course farming Orr because back when it hit 80 that was just the thing to do.

Of course now no doubt you’ll just come up with some arbitrary definition of ‘successfully’ so that your beliefs continue to be self-reinforcing, which also continues to completely ignore the fact that whatever you think of the skill, it would have broken the OP’s CC chain, because using CC that way is just incredibly dependent on killing before it can all be nullified at once, which he fell short of.

…and just for the hell of it, this or this would’ve worked too, from arguably the worst class at escaping anything ever.

None of this changes the fact that rocket boots is an overall terrible skill that wouldn’t even slow down a thief who will cover the distance almost as fast as you and attack you while you are stunned from your own skill.

Matt Witter.6982:

Greetings!

An issue was recently discovered with Burning Oil Mastery that needs immediate attention. While we work on the issue the Burning Oil Mastery line has been temporarily disabled. Players that have spent points in this line will see they have the abilities purchased, but the abilities will not be enabled. Players who have not purchased Burning Oil Mastery will not be able to spend points in this line at this time.“

Can you add Stability to the protection while you are at it? Otherwise people will just constantly be pulled off of it by mesmers.

Without the stability I don’t think the line will accomplish what it seems to be intended to. Which is keeping the oil and player a safer and making it take a longer to kill oil, buying time for people to arrive to help. As well as punish those who do not take it down of course.

Truga.5897:

There’s only “one” build that works well with any weapon you choose. It’s the 0/x/y/20+/30 build. Since most of us don’t like to be forced into using just one weapon until we get a chance to visit the book dude, we pick that.

I also think 30 arcane is almost mandatory. Attunements should be off cooldown as soon as possible so that versatility people talk about actually exists…

I hope you are speaking sPVP only. I run all rampager’s 10/30/20/10/0 and have good success. Though admittedly high level fractals is the one PVE thing I have not done. I’m more of a WvW player really.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/elementalist/?1.3|6.1o.h16|0.0.0.0.0.0|1o.a3.1o.a3.1o.a3.1o.a3.1o.a3.1o.a3|1o.63.1o.63.1o.63.1o.63.1o.63.1g.63|a5.u469.k18.a1.0|2e.1|1m.1q.23.1y.g|e

I’ve switched a few traits around since then as I end up on staff most of the time (WvW and alot of dungeon areas), but the build is still the same aside from some major traits being switched to different stuff. This started out as an air scepter build for fun and morphed into a great staff build hehe.

Truga.5897:

Arheundel.6451:

So basically we should have a weapon suitable for a single situation only out of thousand?
We may as well make an entire profession and call it “Defender”, give it the ele staff and you’re good to go

It’s high damage over time aoe+some control mixed in. If you want direct, instant damage go D/D.

Since it’s high damage over time it’s obviously very useful for area control. But no, it’s not only useful for area control. Like I said, I don’t get too many badges when using staff, but I do get them. When I have time to play gw2 decent amounts I get something like 250/week. That’s really not all that low, considering I don’t like joining zergs, and escorting dolyaks for swiftness, which I often do, doesn’t even award badges.

Staff is very high damage, especially on large groups, because it scales well. You kinda need 50 people to have 5 constantly in your aoes anyway, most aren’t dumb enough to just stand in them. And this goes for every class…

I get an insane amount of bags and I start out with CC, namely static field and/or frozen ground.

Something you must realize is that Meteor Storm can be great, but it’s SLOW and RANDOM. This makes it quite alot less effective in alot of situations. Conversely while lower damage glyph of storms is alot faster, alot more mobile, and tons more reliable. Ice Bow #4 is essentially a smaller very concentrated much faster version of meteor storm with extra bleeding.

In the time that it takes to cast one meteor storm I can cast like 3-6 other spells. Those spells are mobile and I can keep them targeted on the combat if combat is mobile. This is where experience comes in, knowing when to use and when not to use meteor storm can easily double your fight effectiveness. It’s definitely not an “every battle” skill.

Also as an ele you are one of the most effective people for finishing off the downed and making sure they stay downed. You should get alot of bags from that alone. Downed people don’t dodge and aside from thief they are immobile sitting ducks for locational AOE.

Lenn.6347:

Ralathar.7236:

So lets add this up, shadow return removes 3 conditions, teleports you back to where you started from up to 1,200 away, and breaks stun instantly. Hide in Shadows removes all damaging conditions, so any conditions that hurt would be gone and the thief is far away stealthed and running away.

I really don’t know what more I could have done. I condition stacked, immobilized, stunned, and generally wrecked his face but he gets a get out of jail free card. I mean ya I wrecked his face because he was blatantly terrible (rocket turret knockdown is MASSIVELY telegraphed), but he still doesn’t even have to die for being terrible.

as a thief, i cant help but feel offended that you could even remotely accuse them of having unfair GOOJF cards. try d/d ele, or rangers, with their easy access to boons, their uptime, and ridiculous mobility. i get beyond tired of the bad ones just zooming away across the map with their stupid bullkitten, try throwing a fit on a board for one of the actual bullkitten classes.

D/D ele’s is not a get out of jail free card. It’s a trifle imbalanced atm but it’s a combination of fairly good mobility, being able to strafe 90% of their damage at a distance on the run, being able to put up boons way faster than you can strip them, and being able to drop conditions left and right.

Honestly they don’t need big tweaks to bring that down into managable levels, and I HATE fighting bunkers ele’s that actually know how to play. Pretty much takes mass CC lockdown to keep them in place and kill them if they are good. They can be problematic for groups and a death sentence for single players.

Rangers are definitely very evasive and can regen alot, but there is really only 1 or 2 builds that Ranger needs any toning down on. Both of these builds rely on mobility and regen, which is healing over time. They die to CC and spike, but can be rather problematic 1 on 1 for many classes. Faced with a few people however that Ranger should eat dirt quickly.

Pet leash needs to be shortened a bit though. I hate saying that as a range but currently pet leash is something ridiculous like 4,000 to 5,000 I think. Beastmaster build almost certain to get a few key nerfs.
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But you know what none of these people can do? Break Stun while teleporting away and stealth while removing all damaging conditions. This without any traits and using only 1 utility slot. Also, thief is more mobile than all of those, they just don’t play that way for the most part.

Yamsandjams.3267:

Careful with those turrets too, thieves can just CnD off them until they decide they’re ready to fight again.

Yeah, that’s why I bombed them on him leading with flame turret and it’s pulsing blind.

Bacon Please.8407:

Ralathar.7236:

Bacon Please.8407:

Ralathar.7236:

Bacon Please.8407:

The best way to beat a thief is to play a thief. This is coming from a warrior main and let me tell you, it really works.

I play a thief as well. Their frailty is exaggerated as are their “counters”. The only thing my glass thief fears is binding blades.

Then perhaps it is your playstyle as an engineer and not the the thief. Personally I would of never used turrets against a thief. I would of probably went grenade or bomb kid.

Honestly it doesn’t matter what kit, build, or class I was using. He was at 5% hp with high stacks/durations of multiple conditions, stunned, and immobilized. The only thing I didn’t do is instantly spike him with glass cannon DPS. I wouldn’t advise being glass cannon to counter thieves either.

Again, some fights you won’t win. My warrior can’t kill a mesmer but my thief eats then up. My thief has a hard time killing guardians but on my warrior i destroy them. I’m not saying that an engineer can’t kill a thief. Change your playstyle. What runes are you running, gear, traits etc. perhaps you aren’t setup for 1v1 while the thief is .

So what kills a good thief?

Bacon Please.8407:

Ralathar.7236:

Bacon Please.8407:

The best way to beat a thief is to play a thief. This is coming from a warrior main and let me tell you, it really works.

I play a thief as well. Their frailty is exaggerated as are their “counters”. The only thing my glass thief fears is binding blades.

Then perhaps it is your playstyle as an engineer and not the the thief. Personally I would of never used turrets against a thief. I would of probably went grenade or bomb kid.

Honestly it doesn’t matter what kit, build, or class I was using. He was at 5% hp with high stacks/durations of multiple conditions, stunned, and immobilized. The only thing I didn’t do is instantly spike him with glass cannon DPS. I wouldn’t advise being glass cannon to counter thieves either.

Phoenixfudge.5290:

These guys did it right spam AOE and CC. http://youtu.be/hD6NJVTOf-g?t=1m59s

You’ve got to be kidding me, he delivered himself gift wrapped to them and even he admits he totally screwed up in his vidoe description. It only too 2 bunker ele’s and an grenade engineer to capitalize on it too.

Posts like these are why people think all thieves are full of it.

Bacon Please.8407:

The best way to beat a thief is to play a thief. This is coming from a warrior main and let me tell you, it really works.

I play a thief as well. Their frailty is exaggerated as are their “counters”. The only thing my glass thief fears is binding blades.

Bacon Please.8407:

He used his skills wisely just as you did. Congrats, he ran away. you won.

That is a draw just like it is with every other class, and I don’t get my prize money.
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Do you not understand how inherently biased that statement is? That his loss is not killing me and losing nothing, my loss is death, repairs, and a long run. His win is exp and loot, while my win is nothing.

Perfect example of how jacked facing a thief is right now. I’m fighting a thief as a turret engie (Ya I know, but it’s fun :P). Hit him a few times and place my turrets as he enters for the kill. Pop my turret abilities and he gets perma-blinded, has like 10 seconds of burning, has 6+ stacks of bleed, Rocket Turret lands the first knockdown, I time the supply crate for the second stun, rocket turret knocks down a third time. All knockdowns in a row without him being able to act after eating the first one.

At this point the thief still has all the burning, bleeding, and now poison on him, is at 5% hp, and is stunned on his back while immobilized. Shadow Return, Hide in Shadows, runs away at half health with no conditions on him already out of combat.
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So lets add this up, shadow return removes 3 conditions, teleports you back to where you started from up to 1,200 away, and breaks stun instantly. Hide in Shadows removes all damaging conditions, so any conditions that hurt would be gone and the thief is far away stealthed and running away.

I really don’t know what more I could have done. I condition stacked, immobilized, stunned, and generally wrecked his face but he gets a get out of jail free card. I mean ya I wrecked his face because he was blatantly terrible (rocket turret knockdown is MASSIVELY telegraphed), but he still doesn’t even have to die for being terrible.

PinCushion.7390:

Blaine Tog.8304:

Arheundel.6451:

So basically we should have a weapon suitable for a single situation only out of thousand?
We may as well make an entire profession and call it “Defender”, give it the ele staff and you’re good to go

I think you’re going to have to explain your reasoning here. It’s really unclear what you’re trying to say.

He’s saying that staff is too focused on a niche use. He wants it to be more versatile, I’d gather.

But all his wandering around boils down to he wants staff to be easier to play and do more single target damage.

stale.9785:

Ralathar.7236:

stale.9785:

FWIW, blasting staff does NOT increase the hits from Meteor Storm. Also, the maximum number of hits possible from any of our AoEs is 25. 5 targets every second, over 5 seconds. Nothing at all can increase that.

It’s why grouping up in the red circle is the safest way to mitigate damage for a whole zerg faced with AoE spammers. Put 100 people into a field that can hit, absolute maximum, 25 targets. Odds are nobody is going to trigger it more than once, and most people won’t trigger it at all.

EDIT: Meteor storm actually bypasses the limit, making it possible to hit more – it has 5 people per meteor, in a small radius. You still won’t kill somebody with it, but you will get enough tags in to get decent bag return.

If you’re aiming for bags, that’s great, and it works. If you’re aiming to change the flow of battle, you’re better off running something other than staff.

You say that, but if allowed to free cast I can quite literally down entire zergs of people. Meteor Storm, Glyph of Storms, Fire Burst, Ice Bow (same story as meteor storm only far more concentrated, eruption, ice spike. If I cast this on a zerg, people go down. I’ve done it time and time and time again.

It isn’t a question, it isn’t a guess, it’s a certainty that a single ele can wreck an immobile zerg even if they heal. The damage output in an aoe is really high and when you end in water you not only continue to regen the hp of people around you but you throw 3k ice spikes on their head every few seconds.

Dude – what server do you play on? I want to play somewhere where people will stand still for 5-10 minutes to let an ele down them with AoE.

Seriously, if they keep moving, there’s no reason for anyone to take more than 1 hit from any spell, meaning you’re doing (absolute best case with gear and food and luck on the crit) 4k damage to someone, once.

I say this because I regularly play with 15 people. Our approach is to bunch up as close as possible and keep moving. You don’t even have to pay attention to the red circles, because most of the time you won’t be touched by whatever spell is causing them, and if you do they’re going to be such pitiful damage it doesn’t matter. One shout from a guard to clean conditions and you’re laughing.

You didn’t pay much attention to context did you? The damage vs an immobile zerg was in response to the initial quotes claiming that bunching up made you safe because of the AOE cap.

I direct response to you however: yes you can avoid AOE’s, but how much you can avoid is entirely dependent on the skill of the ele’s and the presence or lack of a front line for the ele’s team. With proper CC mixed in an ele should be able to consistently hit a moving group. With a good front line group’s disruption an ele should be able to consistently hit a moving group. With both together an ele can reliably land a large amount of AOE’s on even good players.

I regularly play with anywhere from 5 to 50 people. AOE’s don’t hit/hurt people if you are a bad player vs a good group. AOE’s don’t wreck good groups without teamwork. Conversely a good player will constantly be AOEing even a good group and a good player with good teamwork from other good players will wreck your fricken day with AOE.

There are multiple levels of this and the individual skill of the ele and the teamwork of his group increase his effectiveness alot. I can see how average or worse players running with pugs would have issues landing their AOE’s. But that doesn’t mean AOE’s are broken.

lunyboy.8672:

Ralathar.7236:

People that think that they need damage mitigation to have good defense do not understand how to actively avoid damage properly. If you are good and have a build that isn’t 100% offense you should be able to avoid 80%-90% of damage in the game. Even if you are glass cannon you can still avoid the lion’s share of it.

snip

…my Engineer with 2,500+ armor and 20k+ health has been downed in under 3 seconds by a single thief multiple times before…

If only there was some form of damage mitigation that would have triggered when you were critically hit the first time by that thief…. hmmmmm.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Protective_Shield

lol.

Great, so i’d live for under 4 seconds instead of under 3. 33% reduced damage right?

Except that 1/3 of the damage that thief was gonna do would have already been dealt before the protection activates. So I’d live for under 3 1/2 seconds instead.

I don’t think you understand your math very well if you think 33% damage reduction is going to do much to save someone vs the magnitude of damage being faced. Though I supposed it might buy me the time to heal and then die 1 heartseeker later than I would have before.

It’s not like I can even use that time to apply weakness to try and survive since weakness does not effect crits. Retaliation is right out too since it’s only gonna take this thief a half dozen attacks or so.

There comes a point where there is too much damage to really do anything about it.

Kaleban.9834:

Which leads to the inevitable conclusion, that the Ele is a profession that is absolutely unforgiving and completely depends on player skill. Unlike certain other professions, such as Guardian or Warrior, which many have said can win with auto-attack, the Ele will not play well unless the player plays the profession to the hilt.

This this 100 times this. How much AOE you land depends entirely on how good your placement and prediction is. As well it requires you to intertwine your CC skills and/or work well with others to reach your full potential. All of this while avoiding a particularly nasty death because you were not quick enough to avoid the significant amounts of damaged aimed squarely at your head.

When you get to the level I am, where you can be on the run from multiple melee, possibly even a thief or two and still lay down CC and damage because you understand that meteor storm is both great and extremely limiting….then you get to the big leagues.

I am not some fantastic player. I’m good, but there are people that would eat me for lunch with their skill level. Luckily what I lack in physical coordination and dexterity I make up for with being able to read and predict a battle, discerning next moves, tactics, pushes, and retreats on the fly, all while staying one step ahead of certain death.

If I was a bit worse of a player my effectiveness would likely drop 30% or possibly more in some situations. It really is a razor thin line if you are built glass cannon and without a decade plus of experience I’d likely be sunk.

The big difference between me and alot of the people here sunk though. When I’m sunk I consider it a challenge. When I hear a class is underpowered I consider it a challenge. Rather than mope and whine over perceptions I push myself to break as many perceptions as possible and it has made me a far better player for it.

So people may laugh when I roll out into WvW with my Turret Engie. But they laugh a little less when the guy running the arrow cart they can barely AOE gets destroyed by my 3 turrets I threw on top of the wall, and then the supply crate when he attempted to jump off and run. Is it the most effective engie build ever? Nope. Is it pretty good when used right? Yes. Did I learn alot playing it? Definitely.

I roll alot of such alts. I play around with all the skills and try to break their capabilities. If there is one thing I have reinforced it’s that the vast majority of people on these forums only understand a fragment of the capabilities of their class and have wildly inaccurate ideas about them.

It’s always possible that the version tested in house performed properly and the version released didn’t. Sometimes little things go wrong or 1 guy who needs a cup of coffee goobers something up.

These kinds of mistakes ARE getting old, but I plan on being in the gaming industry one day so I DO sympathize with the onus that developers take on. It’s no easy task at all and 95% of the posters whining and complaining likely couldn’t handle the job even if trained. It’s pretty tough honestly.

People have all these stars in their eyes about what it’s like to work for a game company. It’s pretty soulcrushing at times, they do it because they love it and they hate seeing this kind of stuff just as much as we do.

HeliaXDemoN.1208:

PWNcakesAndROFLs.8263:

Penguin.5197:

lakdav.3694:

At least give them some turret-specific Retaliation with a trait or something!

On one hand a trait like that sounds like a pretty cool idea, it would punish those who use aoe attacks and force them to think twice about using it. On the other hand that also sounds like free ret for thieves.

I love this idea, just like players who attack mesmer clones with AoE, it would punish those who attack our turrets: and even to a further degree, by placing them altogether, would esssentially make a retal bomb!

Thumper Turret with retaliation can be fun.

Sounds interesting lol. But I wouldn’t know where to tie it in.

stale.9785:

FWIW, blasting staff does NOT increase the hits from Meteor Storm. Also, the maximum number of hits possible from any of our AoEs is 25. 5 targets every second, over 5 seconds. Nothing at all can increase that.

It’s why grouping up in the red circle is the safest way to mitigate damage for a whole zerg faced with AoE spammers. Put 100 people into a field that can hit, absolute maximum, 25 targets. Odds are nobody is going to trigger it more than once, and most people won’t trigger it at all.

EDIT: Meteor storm actually bypasses the limit, making it possible to hit more – it has 5 people per meteor, in a small radius. You still won’t kill somebody with it, but you will get enough tags in to get decent bag return.

If you’re aiming for bags, that’s great, and it works. If you’re aiming to change the flow of battle, you’re better off running something other than staff.

You say that, but if allowed to free cast I can quite literally down entire zergs of people. Meteor Storm, Glyph of Storms, Fire Burst, Ice Bow (same story as meteor storm only far more concentrated, eruption, ice spike. If I cast this on a zerg, people go down. I’ve done it time and time and time again.

It isn’t a question, it isn’t a guess, it’s a certainty that a single ele can wreck an immobile zerg even if they heal. The damage output in an aoe is really high and when you end in water you not only continue to regen the hp of people around you but you throw 3k ice spikes on their head every few seconds.

TobyTucker.5317:

This Mastery is just as useless as the cannon one. What’s the first thing people do when they show up at a gate? They destroy any cannons and the oil before anybody has a chance to use them. And what good does that Mastery do you then??? A complete waste of points IMHO.

That’s the whole point, people with the cannon mastery actually hurt quite a bit more and remove boons so it takes more people to overcome them. People with the oil mastery can keep the oil alive alot longer and if people neglect to take it out they will badly punish them. The reason people take them out first is because if you do not they will destroy you if supported by a few people.

Those siege emplacements buy you the time to get people to the tower as well as increase the amount of people needed to take a tower. They are NOT meant to stop zergs.

Not every tower taking force is a zerg by any means, not everyone plays on Tier 1.

I think the Burning Oil Mastery is almost what the Burning Oil needs. It needs a couple more things to do it’s just properly.

1. Give stability as well as protection. Without stability mesmers will just mercilessly pull the ram operator.

2. Make it just an activated skill with a set ground target. This way all you have to do is jump on it and hit the button, no aiming needed. Tweak the radius to be a bit larger if needed to make sure they hit any ram that can hit the gate.

1 enables you to do your job, protection is worthless if you get chain pulled. 2 enables you immediately pour oil instead of needing to adjust your view, aim, and click another button while being destroyed by AOE’s on the wall. It makes it much more easily usable and opens up the option to jump on the oil, pour, and then jump off much more easily.

It should be noted oil’s job is mainly to buy time by preventing building of rams or using of golems until it is down.

They could use some QOL improvements such as being able to attack on the move. I’ve found them very useful on some characters though. Bear form can make even a glass cannon tanky for 30 seconds, wolf form is a good general purpose battle form with a leap knockdown and 2 aoe CC skills plus a great heal, raven form is much more CC and movement control based, snow leapord is well known for it’s stealth and charge.

They are not meant to be competitive with other elites being racial elites, but fact is the Norn Racial elites are actually better than many class elites used right.

As a side note, the more alts you have the lower the relative value of gems is. So the value of the goods and services offered decreases markedly with each additional alt. This makes an additional imbalance in the overall population between those who have single characters and those who play multiple characters.

For instance, I would have gladly bought the mining pick, but upon hearing i only get one of them I decided against it. It would be fabulous were it available to every character like the Collectors edition bonuses I got. Same story with the additional bag slot and mini pets. However it is near pointless when you run multiple alts, much less the unreasonable amount of alts I own.

The money supply is only one possible factor in inflation. However an increase in money supply does not neccesarily mean an increase in the price of goods and services. The only thing an increase in money supply means inherently is that horded money becomes slowly less valuable over time.

Thus 100g at release no longer has the purchasing power that it did, however it is far easier to get that 100g in current day economy. The only time you can say that inflation has happened though is if the increase in the price of goods and services is greater than the increase in the total money supply. Information we are not privy too as players really.

I for one would argue that this still draws real life parallels and still harmful due to it’s precise nature. The lion’s share of the money supply is most likely made by a relatively small % of the player base, the same as the lion’s share of the total money supply is made by a small % of billionaires and corporations IRL. Explained below in more detail.

Thus I would say the situation is similar. People that play the game “just for fun” are left out in the cold by comparison, as are casual players. Whereas the people farming constantly are left in good standing. The ability to game the market easily only supports the ability of people who already possess money to make more money.

Essentially you end up with the same problem as the real life economy which boils down to a situation of the haves and have nots. The idea behind this is capitalistic, you “work harder” you make more money. However this is also somewhat inherently flawed because 1. RL is much more biased towards the already wealthy (ty lobbyists and corporations) and 2. This is a video game, any time I have to “work” to achieve something is a failure imo because this is supposed to be something I do for fun, not something I do as a part time job.

Now herein we hit an additional wrinkle, what do you consider “working” for that gold? I would stipulate that this is behavior far in excess of the normal players performing of generally mundane activities with the express purpose of making gold. While opinions vary, it’s easy to see exactly how many people are running X or Y for gold or in current situation are farming the crap out of Southsun.

While this indeed can be the source of a small % of the populations “fun” this is the temporary and transitory sort of fun which is ultimately harmful to the rest of the video game population.

Final Thoughts

I’m just a 28 year old video game player who has watched and played MMORPG’s and the situational climes of reality with great interest. I am no expert and even experts are quite simply subject to being wrong. In the case of economics specifically sometimes experts overly complicating things or downright attempting to confuse people. Depends on who is paying them really. Still, it makes interesting conjecture and the overall cause of inflation seems to be greed in every case. Guild Wars 2 is not immune to this, though it is generally better than many/most games.

Also, hire meh :P. (sense of humor intact!!)

AndrewSX.3794:

Victory.2879:

Laurels are so anti- multiple toons as is the whole current wvw Wexp set up, it’s like ANet saying ’ PLAY ONLY ONE TOON OR ELSE’

Also, this. But that’s not really a WvW thing only.
Making leveling so easy was meant to let everybody play whatever they want…yet update after update they keep screwing up whoever isn’t using a single char all days everyday.

Ya know, most of the stuff in this thread is pretty silly. The chests are a step forwards and including silver as well as badges and greens. Those of you that have thousands of badges are plainly not using them for the gear and much worse, you are not helping out your realm by buying siege. Thanks for making the rest of us dirt poor carrying you heavy gits too selfish to spend the badges.

However, these quotes are absolutely right. I am an altoholic and have several 80’s, but I also have 20 characters. I enjoy each character having it’s own specific role rather than cumbersome armor switches and retraits. I have contributed a good amount of money to the game. But this game hates people who have alts. Between laurels and gem store items that only provide me 1 single items alone my alts get screwed.

People that think that they need damage mitigation to have good defense do not understand how to actively avoid damage properly. If you are good and have a build that isn’t 100% offense you should be able to avoid 80%-90% of damage in the game. Even if you are glass cannon you can still avoid the lion’s share of it.

I run glass cannon ele with a staff in zerg vs zerg battles and typically survive even when multiple melee get on me. In fact about the only thing that CAN reliably down me if I play right is glass cannon thieves because they can down me near instantly. That’s not even a matter of my build, my Engineer with 2,500+ armor and 20k+ health has been downed in under 3 seconds by a single thief multiple times before.

Sadly for those thieves I almost always do quite alot of AOE damage and so I rally nearly every time and then, since most thieves are terrible, I blow them up or nearly blow them up before they react and escape.

Those that play sPVP know exactly how much damage is avoidable when you can see it coming and you have limited numbers potentially damaging you. This is that much more important in large battles when even stray damage can easily kill you on a glass build.
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Also I see alot of defensive skills listed, but what about Shadow Return? Even post fix it’s one of the best defensive skills in the game usable while stealthed to completely lose the enemy.

multivira.7925:

I’m mainly wondering how many people enjoy the stealth mechanics and hunting down these thieves and mesmers. I can imagine that some people will like the thrill of the chase and all that, but I’m not sure. If people on both sides of the engagement enjoy it, then mechanics are fine in my opinion, but if only one side enjoys the mechanics, something needs to be done.

Not a whole lot and the vast majority of people are completely ineffective at sweeping. You have to pretty much study the spots or be a mesmer that does it to stand a chance outside of completely random luck.

Because the average player is not going to know to sweep that spot that mesmers have invested literally hours upon hours trying to break the geometry and such to find. You’ll still see mesmers spend hours jumping and blinking trying to get to new spots even after the game has been out this long.

It took about 6 months to remove most of the exploits they were using like teleporting through the gate, jumping into the lord room of hills from the cliff above (circumventing both walls), and many other things. But ironically portaling has been considered “fine” the entire time by the mesmer community. “Something in this game finally takes skill”, “It’s easy to see and stop”, “It takes coordination”, “It lets small amounts of people fight the zerg”.

Same exact arguments you see now with perma-stealth teams, no surprise.

multivira.7925:

I prefer retaking a keep over trying to find some bloody mesmer/thief duo. I appreciate the amount of skill that goes into the hiding and god knows I can’t do it. It’s good to see there’s still something in wvw that requires skill over numbers.

There is plenty that requires skill over numbers. Numbers only become insurmountable with imbalances in excess of 2:1 or 3:1 depending on the capability of the groups involved.

Otherwise you can easily eat people with lesser numbers with good play and good tactics.

Xavi.6591:

Keep in mind that with culling gone, it seems you can see farther distances now and make out the red invaders tag a lot easier. It is a lot harder for Mesmers to hide anywhere now than it was in the past.

This is true depending on your settings and the number of people around you. If you are running a mass sweep after take or repel with 50 other people you might easily be culled from seeing distant people for example. So too will those not fortunate enough to have good computers.

Xavi.6591:

Those hiding spots in the cliffs at south bay were fixed patches ago. Just saying.

The blatantly broken ones letting you actually break terrain so NOBODY could see you, yes. The ones where you can still possibly find someone but they can easily LOLrun from you, no. 90% of players don’t even know you can get up there so don’t think to look up there and even if you do depending on your graphical options you might not be able to see skritt or you might be able to see the animations if you strain intensely and watch it for awhile, assuming clusterbomb. Anything else is black on black.

No real way to be sure though. After all gone or dead looks exactly the same as stealthed.

Jitters.9401:

Like the guy below you said. It is easy to spot. The abilities are blatantly obvious when they are going off. Me thinks you guys are not doing actual mesmer/thief sweeps because you are too lazy, so you come here to complain.

You mean like the ledges and cubbies in the cliff wall of bay that are high up out of normal LOS and you have to jumping puzzle to? (but they can see you coming from like 30 seconds away) Is it obvious there? How about spots that provide you no LOS on them but they can see you coming a mile away in Hills? Is it obvious like that? What about animation draw distance, yes it’s happening but how far away can I see it from? (See references to some of the out of the way spots without LOS from your end, but they have LOS to you)

Good teams can see you coming before you see them and then act accordingly. The spots chosen are well suited to it. Videos showing people do it in plain sight of others are videos done by folks who were either lazy or rookies. Ironically this still works a good portion of the time since even once found you have to chase them down with a multitude of people, these folks are built to run/hide/survive after all. You have to invest quite a bit more to kill them than they do to make you need to kill them.

The reason this seems like an easy counter to alot of people is usually one of 4 things:

1. They are a mesmer or thief trying to protect their tactic.

2. You simply don’t know about alot of these clever hiding spots that provide all of the advantages to the people hiding. Back in the day they used to be able to glitch into walls (I’m talking terrain walls not keep walls even) and stuff so you couldn’t see them period. But it was still “fine” to a great many mesmers.

3. You don’t know how mobile they are between their nice spots at need. It’s not a “hidden” or “found” win or lose game. They have many pre-chosen spots to hide for a brief moment, or longer, to reapply stealth to get across a keep undetected. Thus if you actually check they spot they were in they can just move on and you have to guess which way they might have went out of their many options (including doubling back). That is if you even stumbled across them visible instead of stealth (in which case they can just LOL and stay there if you don’t stay at that spot long enough)

4. You’ve killed bad mesmers and teams and think they are all that easy. They are not. Even when discovered the good ones have a very good chance of losing you and hiding again without overwhelming force. Doubling back right through you in stealth is ALWAYS an option, remember that.

I could easily list out multitudes of spots like those mentioned, spots that mesmers don’t want you to know about. But I think that should be enough to make my point.

Here are some pictures of the 1st point I mentioned. Notice how you have to specifically look for that spot to notice it, notice also the pain it takes to get up there, by which time they are shadow refuged and gone to another one of their spots, easily jumping right past your without you having a clue if they so wikitten’s not even that sneaky without stealth. But I hope you have stability because otherwise all of the LOL mesmer pulls will just make them laugh and they are within an extremely short distance of wall>>>outside for portaling.

Gwalchgwn.1659:

Mesmer/thief team
If mesmer is alive, thief will have to use clusterbomb to keep both stealthed. Easy to counter
If mesmer is dead, thief would be “hard” to capture .. BUT anet already gave you the solution. Build stealthtrap on top of dead mesmer body. Sit next to the trap and drink a wee of tea with your guildies.

Congrats, it just cost you 2-3 pieces of siege and multiple to many people spending their time camping a dead body to stop 2 people. Oh and I hope you placed it exactly right or he can still rez from outside of the narrow radius of the trap.

Either way a definitive win for the 2 people tying you up, making you waste siege badges, and having the potential to still succeed if you get distracted and don’t watch for the bar to stop a cleverly positioning rez.

Oh and, I’m sure he doesn’t have shadow step equipped at all….

Kimbald.2697:

small remarks:

1. Throw wrench indeed heals the turret, on both passes. But you throw it at the enemy, not in the direction of a safely placed turret. In the end it does nothing to heal your turret if you placed it somewhere strategically.
And if that heal is the only one you can give your turret… it won’t keep it alive anyhow.

2. The devs need to chose: either turrets are disposable and have low cooldowns (your suggestions) or turrets are durable and stay out for longer periods during the fight (their version on State of the Game).

For your version smaller fixes would suffice, but sadly they mentioned leaving them out yet they didn’t go all the way on the consequences that choice brings.

I don’t believe in a halfbaked mix. Either durable, a LOT more durable, or make them more disposable with a much shorter cooldown.

Not just thumper turret. If rocket turret does not get a better AI, or get better survivability, that 1200 range is always a waste.
And that range is part of the reason it has such a long cooldown.

3. Rifle turret could do with a condition that fits it better than bleed, like vulnerability for example.
If it stacks vulnerability at a decent rate, it would help power builds, help the team, and do more damage itself.

Because let’s face it: who takes the rifle turret?
Condition builds don’t pick rifle turet as first choice. It’s the prefered turret for Static Discharge builds, if they take a turret of course.
Vulnerability would help them more.

And yes: piercing would be so great.
Just like having a real aoe on the rocket turret would be. I agree with both and have made a post about Rocket aoe myself on another occasion.

Thanks for the replies, it’s a very interesting thread.

It’s always good to have discourse.

I did a half-baked mix of sorts with the cooldowns and the survivability because I really do think that too short of cooldowns means too much time playing turret placer and too high of durability with long cooldowns means either they are difficult to counter play or they are just avoided and you’re stuck with high cooldowns. Ideally you need them low enough cooldowns to be reasonably mobile and durable enough to take a few rounds of fire but still fall if picked on directly.

By doing both you get a more reliable overall package which is still able to be counterplayed in multiple ways.

As far as rifle turret directly? I think more people would use it if the base attack wasn’t terrible, it had higher hp, had a stronger toolbelt skill, and a downtime of merely 16 seconds. I put lots of little buffs to it that makes it more useful across the board.

I don’t like the idea of vulnerability because if it’s low amounts then the damage increase is negligble realistically. If it’s high amounts then suddenly the rifle turret becomes way too good if you keep people pinned in it’s range. Bleeding is more reliable and consistent and provides a better balance.

Also Rifle Turret makes a fantastic choice for placing on walls in WvW. 3 Turrets on a cannon operator will flush him off of it shortly, essentially giving you the pressure damage you’d have as grenadier, albeit a bit lesser damage and single target. However they continue to shoot him on the wall mua ha ha. (Easily countered by people killing the turrets but makes a nasty surprise when placed suddenly and with the flame turret blind)

As well Rifle Turret makes a fantastic choice when protecting your back line from the melee and thieves that break through. In this settings the turrets coordinate vs a single target beautifully.

Made a couple edits.

Thumper Turret edit:

After more thinking and testing I separated the baseline cooldown reduction and additional armor into two separate points. I didn’t want to overdo it before, but considering the practical use of thumper turrets I do not think it’s overpowered by any means to have both the cooldown and the added armor on top of the health. They will still be getting hit by multiple targets and are completely immobile, and have very short range.

Very strong in open world PVE perhaps, but in sPVP, dungeons, and WvW they will still melt or be utterly avoided.

Rifle Turret edit:

I remembered that the overcharge actually makes Rifle Turrets shots pierce. I added the suggestion to give this piercing to the Rifle Turrets base attacks in addition to the other changes. With the still lowish damage of these attacks, AI controlling the shots, and extremely thin line of piercing this shouldn’t imbalance anything, but should make for a nice bonus that fits the overcharge better.

Kimbald.2697:

If you go the route of condition damage for all turrets, you narrow their use down to certain builds.
Like the suggestion of adding a bleed to the standard riffle turret attack.

I would simply say: let turrets scale on power too!
That way everybody can make the best of them in any build they choose.

My rocket turret should scale on power if I use it in a full power build. So should a rifle turret.

I realise this goes against standard pet scaling in this game. But turrets have several flaws that other pets don’t have, movement being the most visual one.
So giving turrets a different scaling system than other pets isn’t all that overpowered.

Letting the power not scale allows their base damage to be higher. This allows you to build alot more bunker and still get more mileage out of the turrets. Scaling on power would be both an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time for builds. While it would help power builds, alot of other builds would lose out.

I wouldn’t be specifically opposed to power scaling, but it changes the way they have it now and it’s a trade-off, not an advantage. As well the damage on some things might have to be lowered in that case, power/condition gear and current turrets would do quite alot of damage currently without changing their baseline damage to be lower. Currently their baseline damage is actually pretty decent or even good, with the exception of the rifle turret normal attacks. (hence the boost)

Adding bleed on the base turret attack and toolbelt skill is just there to increase the damage by around 20% on the baseline, while still allowing condition builds to get their mileage out of turrets. The turret already has a bleeding attack on the overcharge, I figured it just fit to give it the bleeding on the normal attack.

Kimbald.2697:

On the survivability I don’t think the suggestions will help all that much.
It’s good they would get some vitality added, but it’s not going to save them I’m afraid.

First of all, and simplest: toughness. Scaling or baseline, but they need a lot of it.

A better option would be to make turrets immune to any attack that is not targeting them directly.
They are supposed to be a hinderance to the enemy. In order to do that they need to stay alive untill directly destroyed.

Funny fact: in the State of the Game the devs actually discussed turrets as if they worked this way.
They don’t… Turrets die in any aoe in seconds. A few k more health won’t make them last longer in there.

This touches upon a weird way of how turrets work:
turrets die fast if we put them near us.
Deployable turrets is the best mechanic we have to keep them alive.
But turrets target wrong targets if we put them far, making deployable turrets counter-productive.
Most turrets also have very short range.
Turrets can be healed with Tool Kit, but tool kit is melee range so the turret needs to be right at you.

So instead of being forced to use deployable turrets t keep your turret alive, I would rather be able to use them up close and still know they can survive the damage.

This is why my suggestion is both increasing the health of turrets by a fair amount as well as decreasing cooldowns across the board via the trait Metal Plating. I also decreased the cooldown of specific turrets baseline.

Current cooldowns:

Rifle Turret: 20 seconds
Flame Turret: 25 seconds
Net Turret: 30 seconds
Thumper Turret: 50 seconds
Rocket Turret: 50 seconds (50 second toolbelt skill recharge)

Cooldowns with my suggestions while using Metal Plating Trait:

Rifle Turret: 16 seconds
Flame Turret: 20 seconds
Net Turret: 24 seconds
Thumper Turret: 32 seconds
Rocket Turret: 32 seconds (40 second toolbelt skill recharge)

The 30 secondish window leaves rocket turret and thumper turret on cooldown when they die, but 30 seconds is a much more manageable cooldown than 50 seconds. Combine these recharges with the reduction on picking them up and you’ve got nice recharges for turrets that live.

Also take a second look at the thumper turret section. I’ve separated the cooldown and the armor buff. I really want that thing alot tougher so you can actually use it how it’s intended to be used. But it’s the only turret that specifically needs the additional armor specifically.

As a side note the toolbelt skill throw wrench heals turrets I believe. Also the range of turrets is actually improved with a trait, rifled turrets.

Kimbald.2697:

Turret AI stuff

Coding the turrets to smartly attack the right thing while being immobile would be both difficult for the programmers and difficult for the players to use properly as well. It would also require them to rework their AI completely. Currently with good placement you can get consistent damage out of your turrets in large battles and you can hit the people you want in small battles.

Yes, sometimes they will go for pets or NPC’s sometimes. But this can be largely overcome with good placement. Also, this can be used as a balancing factor to have a bit stronger turrets than you could have with proper AI.

If you want turret fixes sometime quicker than 3-6 months, letting the AI stay as it is would be the way to go. They still don’t even have Ranger pet AI working properly as the pets actually STOP to attack and so have issuekittenting moving targets. But similarly that is part of why the pets still do as much damage as they do.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Reasons to defend a tower

I think a problem is: it gets boring quite fast to defend a tower when no one is attacking. WXP for repairing is only a small step to reward you for staying. Some spontaneous ideas:

• if you take a tower a skill-challenge spawns in the tower. So there is an activity which keeps you there for a while. This is only a small addition and wouldn’t be enough, but a first step.
• when you take a tower follow up events spawn in very close proximity to that tower. examples:
• collect pieces of rubble (collect event) – reward: Karma, Gold, A random piece of loot + all walls auto-repair slowly.
• train the staff (similar to the southern Queensdale training heart-quests; you train NPCs inside the keep by using environmental weapons) – reward: Karma, Gold, a random piece of loot + stronger NPC-guards.

all in all there could be 10-15 different activities per keep – some of those unique to the specific keep where you are. This would keep a lot of people in the proximity of newly taken keeps and would make it easier to defend those from zergs.

I like this idea, specifically because each of the little skill challenges, which would likely having a spaced running rotation, actually help with defense a little. You’d still have mostly the same core group defending and watching for enemies, but now they get rewarded for it and the tower is slightly harder to take.

People that say “PVE in Wvw” blah blah blah: I highly doubt you were the ones defending in the first place. If PVE is too boring for you then defending definitely is. Seeing as this would have no relevance to you I can only believe you don’t want your karma train to stop.

Distract from watching? Perhaps. But if the activities not actively making you patrol were short then it wouldn’t be enough to matter. The fact that there are tangible benefits for the keep/tower for completing these tasks also mitigates that quite a bit. Heck one of the tasks could be to train a lookout who will then call out attacks when the keep becomes contested.

Czar Peter.7961:

ANet is aware of the problem and has already solved it with stealth traps. A thief spec’ed for stealth that can’t stealth for 30 seconds is deader than Microsoft’s future ambitions for the OS market.

Refer to the post above yours. To counter thieves/mesmers in keeps with traps would require a significant and constant expenditure of badges and karma, while requiring little to no expenditure on the other side. It would be even more worth it than currently as you’d be draining badges that could be used for siege.

Nordic Natedog.4360:

I know that barrage has the potential for more hits, I was going off the numbers he was stating. Every AoE has the potential for very similar effects like the guy complaining about dropping a feedback bubble onto a mob and getting knocked down to 0 nearly instantly. Again, you are looking it merely at a point of view on how much damage YOU took and not the overall effectiveness of your attack. You certainly got hit with a ton of damage but you dished out an overwhelmingly greater number onto the foes you hit. This is the case with all AoE. Yes you run the risk of being insta-downed by dropping some AoE onto a zerg, but you are also doing it to do a considerable MORE damage to your foes. I don’t understand why people don’t understand this concept.

The problem isn’t that you did that damage back to me. The problem is six-fold.

1. You literally did that damage back to me passively with 1 move. So with one skill you downed me.

2. You didn’t even have to use any sort of skill, you applied the buff and lol’d as I got wrecked by a passive buff.

3, You can do other things while you reap this damage. This means that you did 10k-20k+ to me over the course of 7 seconds. This is only what I personally gave you. The reality is that you could have literally done 50k of damage during that time in a zerg vs zerg battle, by applying 1 buff and this isn’t even including your own damage.

4. There is not proper counter-play for it to be that strong. Boon stripping is an option, but it is rare and unreliable. You will many times strip other boons instead. If there were skills people could counter retal with, it’d be fine, but you cannot reliably counter it. Not attacking till it’s down is not an option since it becomes a daze at that point and can be kept up quite a long time or even permanently.

5. It affects some attacks way more than others. Ranger Greatsword will take modest damage, Ranger Longbow will get utterly wrecked, thief will take minor damage outside of clusterbomb spam, condition thief will not even notice you’ve used it.

So maybe you think it’s fair to gain the damage of many people from one boon. However I don’ think that is balanced at all.

Again, you are looking it merely at a point of view on how much damage YOU took and not the overall effectiveness of your attack. You certainly got hit with a ton of damage but you dished out an overwhelmingly greater number onto the foes you hit.

Tell ya what. I’m doing around 500-600 damage a hit with barrage currently. You are doing 300-400 a hit back to me. That’s over 50% damage return.

If you think this is so fair then you should take over 50% of YOUR damage back to you. If you really believe your own logic you should be fine with that. After all you just have to look at the effectiveness of your attack. So for instance a single large strike doing 2k to 3 people would be 6k total damage and so you would receive 3,600 from retal.

Draygo.9473:

Kodiack.2783:

how to counter stealth. True sight. every other MMO has a stealth counter that a player can obtain thru traits or skills.

Anet’s answer is traps.

-K

Traps do work though.

If traps were cheap this is true, as it is however they are only useful for very select situations. Like keeping the perma-stealth thieves from killing your supply camp trebs without dedicating 10 people to chase him around.

For 99% of WvW situations stealth traps or either ineffective due to the massive amount of area you need to cover (and their ability to teleport/blink past chokes) or simply not worth the cost to kill 1 thief for no better reason than to net a kill. (15 badges plus karma to get 2 badges maybe).

WitM.2308:

I love how people want to substitute EZmode for actually having to do the work to beat skill and patience. Most people don’t have the patience to stealth for 10min while you wait for your team to get their act together, most people don’t have the skill to avoid detection from a half-hearted sweep, and most people haven’t spent the time looking at how to hide properly. If you can avoid a proper sweep you deserve the keep, because obviously someone missed a spot. Put in the work and thinking time and you won’t lose keeps to stealth teams.

I’ll probably make this point every time I think of posting here in one way or another: Your playstyle isn’t the only playstyle, and whether or not you like solo trolls, small unit tactics, zergbusting, PvDoor, or whatever, there is room for you in WvW, and at the same time you will upset someone who doesn’t like “that style of play”. Upset them and leave a flame ram on their corpse.

I was invited into my current guild for literally escorting dolyaks and upgrading all night long. I understand well the value of patience and skill while everyone else is doing the fun stuff and taking things, while I don’t even get rewarded.

They made me stop doing that to get my first 80 because I wasn’t leveling very fast that way. (altaholic btw, I play all classes in multiple ways)

I take tactics, counters to those tactics, and counters to those counters seriously. This is why I spent the first month of WvW studying the supply mechanics and how they affected everything.

I’ve similarly studied this. Mesmer teams don’t even use their full potential currently. They could cause much more havoc than merely threatening to back cap a keep. But much like the ephemeral counters mesmers speak of that exist but should never be spoken, so too will I keep this information to myself.